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A decade ago, your company website might have been a kind of
digital brochure with some basic contact information. Taking that
approach in 2013 will make you look like you're wearing mom jeans
to Coachella.

These days, a successful digital presence is a living, breathing,
meaningful experience--rooted in inspiration, customer empathy
and clear utility. Your goal is to provide real value to
prospects and customers by anticipating their needs, giving them
a reason to do business with you and fostering their loyalty to
your brand. There's even a verb for all this:
grokking--understanding or communicating through empathy or
intuition.

The problem is that creating a great web
experience is easy in theory but difficult in practice, if
only because there's so much that can be done. Broad, generalized
web content doesn't resonate with visitors. So, how do you tailor
your content to fit specific needs?

The answer is by looking not just at customer demographics but at
behavior. Standard demographic data doesn't cut it anymore, says
Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, a marketing technology company based
in Scottsdale, Ariz. Why? Because such simple customer profiles
don't tell you how to reach people, only that they exist.

Instead, you should be building example profiles of people who
influence or make decisions about what you're selling. Marketers
call these "buyer personas," and they can be enormously helpful
in persuading potential customers to choose you over a
competitor.

Take a look at this stat from Demandbase/Ziff Davis: When
crafting new content, just 36 percent of marketers focus their
attention on buyer personas. You need to be one of them. So
consider not only who your ideal customers are (job title,
industry, location or company size) but also how they live and
work. Are they on the road a lot? Are they online? Offline? Where
do they get information? Who influences the decisions they make?
Which blogs do they read?

What events do they attend? Which social networks do they rely
on? Do your twentysomething prospects poll their friends on
Facebook and Twitter, read recommendations on Yelp or browse
Pinterest? What factors might they consider before pulling the
trigger on a purchase?

There are ways to get this information, starting with asking. You
could telephone a few customers (both happy and grumpy) and
interview them; you might also query current prospects. Talking
in person or by phone is best, but you can also gather
information via a free survey tool like SurveyMonkey.com.

Essentially, knowing who you are selling to--and why and how they
buy--makes your job a whole lot easier. The buyer personas
"become the root of how we talk to our buyers," Gray says.

Insightful buyer personas can inform strategies for messaging or
content marketing, product launches, ad campaigns and sales
alignment, says Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute, a
training and consulting company in Puget Sound, Wash. The key,
she adds, is to think of such customer insight as your secret
weapon: "When you know when, how and why buyers look for an
answer to the problems that you address, that knowledge is a
significant source of competitive advantage for your business."